Well, everyone has his/her limit.
Although I don’t like government intervention, I am not willing to see several million families devastated by massive layoffs, small businesses fail, and my state (and a lot of others) driven to depression conditions in order to prove a point.
I am a pragmatist, not an ideological conservative. I suppose if you have a secure income you can take a hard line position. Since my husband is already working 1000 miles away from me and we cannot sell our house due to the real estate crisis, I am a little more empathetic to the people connected to Detroit’s auto industry.
And I will also tell you that people who write this hard line approach, or talk it on radio, are losing people for the Republican party. President Bush at least has enough sense to try to do something, rather than taking a laissez-faire approach.
This is one of your problems. You see the world as it only relates to you and make assumptions about others that are not true. Therefore, you probably end up wrong more often than not.
On the contrary, my husband works for a small manufacturing company that hasn’t quite recovered from the last recession. My husband was laid off from both of his jobs (full time and part time) for a long time.
The company just laid off employees and the rest had to take a 20% paycut. Manufacturing has been depressed for a long time here in WI. However, it is a small company, non-union, and fat chance in hell anyone will be handing it any free money.
I do not think that it is right for the auto workers to be saved from the nasty fate the rest of us have to face using what little money we have left. It is OUR money that will be used.
Auto workers reaped the benefits of fat paychecks and benefits for years that other manufacturing workers did not have. What makes them so special? The unions are what helped to bring manufacturing down. Time to pay the piper.
The Republican party deserves to lose people. It no longer represents what it used to. We have left. I’m sure others have too.
No, we don’t have a secure income. But we would be a heck of alot better off if the government stayed out of our way and stopped playing nanny to whining union workers.